1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to the field of telecommunications and, in particular to a method and apparatus for establishing a voice call by way of an electronic mail message.
2. Background Information
In recent years, information technology including personal computer, telecommunication, and television technologies have begun to converge, whereby clear demarcations that once separated the various technologies have blurred. This xe2x80x9cconvergencexe2x80x9d may be attributed, at least in part, to the explosive growth of the Internet.
Internet based voice communication is one advance in the telecommunications industry that has been made possible through the growth of the Internet. For example, calls that were once required to be managed by the public switched telephone network (PSTN) that assigns a dedicated communication line or circuit for each user to complete a telephone call, may now be connected through the shared medium of the Internet by breaking the voice data into varying sized packages or xe2x80x9cpackets,xe2x80x9d and transmitting them over the shared medium of the Internet.
The Internet Protocol (IP) is a protocol utilized throughout the Internet to interleave and transmit data packets so as to best utilize the available bandwidth at any given time. Voice over IP (VoIP) is a term used to describe a set of services for managing the delivery of voice information using the Internet protocol. Various software products on the market provide VoIP services that enable two parties (e.g., caller and callee) to communicate with each other through the Internet. In order to do so, however, each of the parties to the VoIP call are typically required to communicate through hardware utilizing compatible voice encoders or xe2x80x9cCODECs.xe2x80x9d Although emerging standards such as the International Telecommunication Union""s (ITU) H.323 standard attempts to alleviate the CODEC compatibility issue, the parties to the call are nonetheless each required to communicate through a computer system or appliance equipped to place and/or receive VoIP calls. Unfortunately, however, not everyone has access to such VoIP equipped hardware. In fact, given the wide availability of PSTN handsets and their associated ease of use, even those who have access to such VoIP equipped hardware may nonetheless prefer to communicate via the more commonplace PSTN handsets.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,026,087, titled xe2x80x9cMethod and Apparatus for Establishing a Voice Call to a PSTN Extension for a Networked Client Computerxe2x80x9d (having a common assignee with the present application) addresses the need for bridging the Internet and packet based devices with conventional PSTN handsets. Accordingly, a user of a networked computer can place a voice call to a PSTN extension (equipped with merely a conventional handset) rather than being limited to placing a voice call to only VoIP equipped hardware. Although this goes a long way towards integrating the VoIP functionality of the Internet with the PSTN, further integration remains desirable.